Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 71

generation. We see technology improve day-by-day, but the school system hasn't changed in years and is out of date when compared to our progress in technology. Everything in our world relies on it, and younger people are used to its constant use and dependability. As schools transition to e-Schools, students will feel more comfortable and familiar with it rather than distant. The vision of teens when it comes to what school is like is often "uninteresting" or "not what I had expected," and yes there still are students who look forward to school and studying, but they are fewer and fewer every year. A school that has embraced technology and uses it to its advantage will have significantly more students that are impatient to go back to personal devices and gadgets and significantly fewer students that consider it just a mundane task. Thinking about the role the teacher has in the e-Society educational system I came across of what seemed to me the perfect definition “… what the teacher must be, to be an effective competence model, is a day-to-day working model with whom to interact. It is not so much that the teacher provides a model to imitate. Rather, it is that the teacher can become a part of the student`s internal dialogue- somebody whose respect he wants, someone whose standards he wishes to make his own. It is like becoming a speaker of a language one shares with somebody. The language of that interaction becomes a part of oneself, and the standards of style and clarity that one adopts for that interaction become a part of one`s own standards.” (Bruner, 1966, p. 124) Finding common ground with your students can sometimes be a difficult task even for an experienced teacher, but getting to know your students and their interests can help a teacher find ways and get creative when it comes to using devices to their advantage. “Education matters, profoundly. For our children, but also for the people who teach our children. Meta-education – teaching the people who teach – is just as important.” (DiGiano, Goldman, & Chorost, 2009, p. 1), learning from each other is the most important thing. 3. Educational Strategies A. Dialogue Journal Writing/ Speaking The day school starts, every student faces the unknown: a new teacher, a new situation, new colleagues or a new language. Even if the student has attended the same school for some years, first day jitters are common. The emotional impact the new school year has is being heightened by the possibility of attending a new school or studying a new language, especially a language one cannot speak. “After the first days of school, once they have developed some assurance that the teachers, the classroom, and classmates are safe and that there are ways of coping, students are usually ready to talk to someone, to express their fears or confusions, and to ask for explanations about what they don’t understand. The teacher is the obvious person to talk to, but attempting to talk to the teacher can be frustrating. After working up the courage to approach the teacher, and despite careful mental rehearsals, students often feel uncertain of what to say, or find that someone else is there listening in, or that the teacher responds with a question or a comment which the student doesn’t understand. The result can be a renewed sense of failure, which can eventually undermine the willingness to attempt to communicate at all.” (Peyton & Reed, 2011, p. 1) The solution to this problem is the dialogue journal – it provides a way for students to communicate without having to deal with the trouble of face- to-face encounters. “A dialogue journal is a conversation between a teacher and an individual student. However, this conversation differs from all other they may have, in or out of the classroom; it is written, it is completely private, and it takes place regularly and continually throughout an entire school year.” (Peyton & Reed, 2011, p. 3) Taking this idea even further and trying to combine different devices, the dialogue journal can have an audio format, a video format or a written format in the shape of a notebook where the teacher is a partner in the conversation. This particular educational strategy can create a bond between the student 71